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Yesterday, at around 5pm in the UK, Twitter had an outage so large that it took the entire web service down for over an hour, and mobile users could not see new tweets.

The site was back an hour and ten minutes later, only to drop again for a further 28 minutes. Speculation was rampant. Some believed that the social network had been hacked, others suggested the sheer weight of tweets about the Euro 2012 footy tournament had ground the service to a halt.

Neither of these were true (after all, the match last night was Portugal versus the Czech Republic, hardly one of world football's marquee meetings). Instead, the fault has been revealed by Twitter to have been a "cascading bug", a "bug with an effect that isn’t confined to a particular software element, but rather its effect 'cascades' into other elements as well".

To correct the issue, which affected the service worldwide, the team had to roll back to a previous version of Twitter, but now promises that the necessary fixes are in place. It also says measures are being taken to ensure this doesn't happen again.

Perhaps the bizarrest element of the Twitter outage is the response by its dedicated members, one (@arghya_rc) even went on to post, "OMG..twitter was down....closest thing to living without oxygen for most of us...."

He's wrong of course, it's more like losing a kidney - you're regretful it's no longer around, but can carry on living a full and healthy life without it.

Were you devastated that Twitter went down for just over an hour? Or don't you care? Let us know in the comments below...